Skip to content

American military Quote by Tim Weiner

““Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice President Cheney had wanted to send the American military to a Muslim enclave in Lackawanna, a dead-end upstate New York town by the Canadian border. The troops were going to seize six suspected al-Qaeda supporters—all of them Americans—charge them as enemy combatants, and send them to Guantánamo forever. The””

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.9 out of 5 (5 ratings)

American military Rule of law Vice president

More by Tim Weiner

“Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law.”

Image

“The president and the vice president wanted the FBI to execute searches in secret, avoiding the strictures of the legal and constitutional standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the…

“On December 4, 1998, the headline on the President’s Daily Brief, the most secret intelligence document in the government of the United States, read: “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” It was a secondhand report picked up by the CIA from the Egyptian intelligence service, but no one ever had seen anything like it. “Bin Ladin…

“Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. (480)”

Image

“Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay. “We destroyed them. We told you,” he told Piro on February 13, 2004. “By God, if I had such weapons, I…

“The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah,” President Bush said at a Republican fund-raiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 9.…

Image

“The attorney general also spelled out some of the authorities the FBI would use under the Patriot Act, which passed the Senate that same day: capturing e-mail addresses, tapping cell phones, opening voice-mails, culling credit card and bank account numbers from the Internet. All of this would be done under law, he said, with subpoenas and search warrants. But the…

“In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain “valuable actionable intelligence” before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a…

“On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages…

“Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into…

“On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.” “They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to…

“The CIA officer at the black site relayed the report to his headquarters. The CIA’s director, George Tenet, was unhappy to learn that the FBI was leading the questioning. He ordered a CIA counterterrorism team to take over in Thailand. “We were removed,” Soufan said. “Harsh techniques were introduced”—at first, stripping the prisoner of his clothes and depriving him of…

Explore all 33 Tim Weiner quotes

More American military quotes

Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!

William H. Prescott

Image

As a soldier and combat veteran, I believe American military forces should only be used in the defense and furtherance of our nation's vital…

Image

I'm post-cynical on this stuff. I look at the El Salvador model as the glory days: Why don't we just fund the death squads secretly and keep our boys at home? That where I almost am at this point. Clearly the American military has been a force for good for the United States. There's a reason we have a standing…

Michael Hastings

The U.S. couldn't play a military role in different areas like Iraq and Afghanistan without huge quantities of oil. So a shortage or disruption…

Image

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

Image

I learned to be far more skeptical of what I'm told by presidents, no matter who the presidents are, and also to be much…

Hillary Clinton

Image

“The South Pacific was once the playground for ship-sick European sailors. Then it became the roistering barricade of the last great pirates. Next it…

James A. Michener

Image

Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around…

Image

Unlike the Afghans and Iraqis, the South Korean people solidly supported the American military presence, which was part of a United Nations operation.

John Eisenhower

Image

Old Glory represents our great American military and their sacrifices to ensure our freedom. This isn't a political issue. This is about Patriotism, and…

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Image

Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

Chester W. Nimitz

Image

The campaign in Iraq illustrates the continuing progress of military technology and tactics, but if there is a single overriding lesson it must be…

Image

Browse all 103 American military quotes